Folk's Folly Prime Steak House

The Restaurant

Folk's Folly opened in 1977 when Humphrey Folk Jr. — a Memphis cattleman with no restaurant experience — bought a Mendenhall Road bungalow and converted it into the city's first dedicated prime steakhouse. The name was a tongue-in-cheek nod to local skepticism that a Memphis steakhouse could survive in a barbecue town. Nearly fifty years later, Folk's Folly is the city's institutional special-occasion dinner, run by the founding family's second generation and still occupying the same East Memphis bungalow with thoughtful expansions over the years. The main floor seats roughly one hundred and forty across multiple intimate rooms: wood-panelled walls, white tablecloths, brass fixtures, candlelit tables, leather banquettes, and a careful collection of Memphis-cattle history on the walls.

The kitchen project is classical American prime steakhouse executed at the city's highest level. The beef programme is built on USDA Prime wet-aged in-house — bone-in ribeye, filet, the Folk's-cut strip, a porterhouse for two that has been on the menu since opening — supplemented by Australian Wagyu and a daily-changing fresh fish list. Signature plates have included the house-prepared escargot, the Caesar salad finished tableside, the lobster bisque, and the bananas Foster prepared at the table with the dining room's full attention. The wine programme runs roughly six hundred references with serious Napa Cabernet and Bordeaux depth, a careful Burgundy progression, and one of the South's better extensive American steakhouse cellars.

The Cellar piano bar downstairs — a separate room that opens at five and runs late into the night — has been Memphis's senior business and political negotiation perch for nearly four decades. The bar list runs through classical American cocktails (the Manhattan, the Old Fashioned, the Vesper) prepared at restaurant-bar standard, and the piano programme rotates through senior Memphis musicians. For a Memphis dinner that needs the room to register as a deliberate institutional choice — the kind of dinner where the table's gravity does some of the conversational work — Folk's Folly is the structurally inevitable East Memphis answer.